Too Much Of An Inside Look

Jon Udell

SHOW-STOPPER!: THE BREAKNECK RACE TO CREATE WINDOWS NT AND THE NEXT GENERATION AT MICROSOFT by G. Pascal Zachary The Free Press, ISBN 0-02-935671-7, $22.95

I found this inside account of Windows NT's development less satisfying than its role model, The Soul of a New Machine. Sure, it's titillating to read about Dave Cutler's Bunyan-like exploits and sobering to be reminded how a major software project can devastate the families of the engineers, but we've heard all this before. What I wanted from this book was more technical sophistication and more balanced reporting than it delivered.

A computer, we're told, is like a wealthy English household in the 1890s, in which the upstairs crowd (applications) is served by the downstairs crew (the operating system). Well yes, I suppose, but upstairs/downstairs analogies don't begin to unravel the political and technical issues driving Microsoft in its war with IBM and the Unix community. The problem is that while G. Pascal Zachary interviewed dozens of Microsoft employees, he talked to virtually no one outside the company. A wider net might have landed a livelier and more important book.

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Jon Udell is a BYTE senior technical editor at large. You can reach him on the Internet or BIX at judell@bix.com .